the reds

 

and lots of patience. patience to extract the dye, to age the mordanted cloth to dye slowly.to re dye and age. not mentioning the loom controlled shibori; the tieing, drawing tight the cloth, untieing. no one would pay for all the hours spent.that's why i do it for me.

 

some considerations: the cotton didn't shrink as much as intended so the cloth is pretty open, almost like a gauze. i'll have to line the garment if i don't want to overexpose myself.
i'm pleased with the color shifts a result from mordanting with alumn and then painting with iron in certain parts.


the pattern and the pleats. don't know whether to iron it flat or not. it will not hold the pleats forever and sewing will be impossible for me.


on the thyroid front i was prescribed eutyrox50. will be making merkel labs richer.i read that people on it put on weight. as if i hadn't put on enough. holding back until i get another opinion. looking for a doctor that listens and then prescribes. feel  like Diogenes with his lamp.



neki desu

can't weave no mo'

 

a nice view from the back beam the finishing line. impossible to keep going because one gets floating shafts :(

fabric off the loom, what a beautiful sight! total length 335 cms. width 69 cms.feeling satisfied with the outcome woven on my 12 sha table loom. it's 80cms wide, but the lifts for  the 335 cms were done by hand! the structure is an advancing supplemental  merino weft on a wool plain weave ground. it's the same principle as a loom controlled shibori, but this time instead of gathering the supplemental weft it is going to be shrunk for texture.  see partial draft here.

wet finished mega beauty. 30 minutes in very hot water

and  liquid savon de marseille in my mini washer gave these soft ripples which a better photographer would have captured.. 

i could go for deeper furrows sacrificing width. right now after wet finishing i have 300cms in length

 and 65 cms wide.

would like to find one of those waste free patterns and go from there whether to full more or not.

on to pattern hunting now.

neki desu

aaand lift off!

already weaving.

the 2/18 jaggerspun merino supplemental thread cuts it.and if i go on and felt it a bit more it will look even better. i do not mind if the floats show and they are not too long to catch.i'm using them as design elements, seriously

neki desu
 

anticlimactic

pun intended on various levels. the scarf above started last spring  went on dyeing through spring and summer went on into winter with mokume shibori and kakishibu. i really wanted to try kakishibu on wool because i had heard it was not very successful. and it's true, not even after aging and exposing it to uv rays it blooms. so now i have a wool scarf in the middle of spring. take climate and climax!

although this really can go on because i'm thinking of shifting the color a bit. either overdyeing it in some of that gorgeous brazilwood or a weakened walnut hull dye.

as murakami says in 1Q89: sony and cher, the beat goes on.

neki desu

after the show some color

(^_^) off to do some errands.

back from errands.show gone wonky. 2nd try... let's see if it works


neki desu

keeping up

with the aizome fad. this meter twenty five cm long cotton was bought in takayama at a lovely broccante shop where i also bought a loom reed made from reeds-hence the name- and an itomaki.
the cotton fabric, patterned in miura shibori, is long and wide enough to be used as a neck wrap. great for spring weather.
the photo was found during the  weekend cleaning frenzy . i even cleaned and organized my computer  files!

neki desu


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a weaver under the influence

It rained for four years eleven months and two days.....
Just like in the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

But unlike the effect of the rain in the characters in the novel i am busy and moving. Albeit the BLAH humor. So many consecutive rainy days and not even my hot pink Hello Kitty wanna be Wellies make neither me nor other people chuckle.
The current weaving reflects the colors that have been surrounding me. A tex 100 soft spun light gray wool. Some very random shots of logwood dyed mauvish gray silk tram for sparkle. The actual idea behind is that as the piece will be fulled and felted the silk will slightly kink out. At least in the mind's eye as you can never really tell/sample fulling for sure.i intend exploring loom controlled felting with resist paste. Hope that by the time i finish the weaving the rain will have gone away. If not the piece will be drying forever-no dryer here. Remember i live in sunny Spain. HA!

As a side note i cannot even start to count the ways i love pshopping. The photo above was shot in the worst light conditions with an energy saving light bulb and natural light AWOL .i got the most horrible yellow cast and i hate bad photos in general and of textiles in particular. After so much energy and soul poured into a work then comes a crummy photo and kills the piece.

i added layers by duplicating and corrected the levels by configuring the white and gray with the dropper in each layer and merged them. Then came the tour de force- copy layer, flood fill color light lilac opacity 37% merge mode normal. And flatten.
i got rid of all the horrible color overcast and was able to render the colors as they actually are. At least on my screen. i love correcting lousy photos!

As a closing remark i want to thank all the kind comments received re my previous post.
They got me back to the loom pronto.

neki desu


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a mild disappointment

That's what my cotton loom controlled shibori shawl turned out to be . The ai came out just o.k.
There was no way to pump it up to deep indigo, so i had to content myself with what i got.
The other issue was the white loosing its pristine color to become dirty wash water as you all can see in the photo.This is strange as indigo works with oxidation and the white was gathered tight so as not to be exposed to the color. i try to fool myself saying that it is an optical illusion, but it just doesn't cut it.
However the kakishibu dyed borders look fine with the blue patterning.
And albeit shrinking a bit the cotton fabric, nice and airy, has a nice hand .

Hmm... maybe another dweller in the bottom drawer taking a time cure?

neki desu
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there are good times and bad times

And this time's not good for starting new projects.
Just sampling on a bit of leftover loom controlled shibori warp.
Here's the outcome, pretty much self explanatory.
Except that i think the printing was a bit of an overkill.No printing next time.

Check the slideshow at my blog.

neki desu


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ode to domesticity : sample, sample, sample

It's Tuesday, the bread machine is churning away and i've just finished untieing the loom controlled shibori sample. It will be this summer's indigo vat victim, if the vat runs well, that is.
i'm not well known for my sampling, an activity i have a dislike for. But lately i've come to bite the dust as i have no other option. Or is it that finally i've grown up?

This is a lovely 20/2 cotton with a 20 singles weft from a Japanese company (surprise, surprise)
that had a mill near Girona. The company closed down some years ago and my friend got hold of some yarn cones for me.
The supplemental weft was a bit thicker than what it should have been and created that lacy effect.
i'm not sure if i like it or not. Also in the not sure department is the white background. It is too white for the bold blue motifs and i'm thinking about dyeing it a very light blue before gathering the shibori weft.
The loom is already warped so there's no chance of dyeing the skeins. Therefore i'll test the blue background by doing some p-shopping to it. Bless the program for color sampling!
i said i had no option but sample, but this means warp the loom and weave 20-30 cms, cut and move on..Not like regular sample champs who put on a whole warp for this sole purpose.

i'm also not crazy about the baby doo-doo color of the borders. This was what i got from the murasakizome. No beautiful deep, rich purple here. After 10 i lost count of the dips and was still not getting there. Even bought bottled water as i think my tap water is very hard and heavily chlorinated too.
Hopefully the indigo will take care of the color and add some interest to it.

Now i have to weave the shawl, which is on the 12 shaft table loom. My romance with this loom continues.
i think i have definitely grown up.

neki desu

loom controlled shibori-show and tell

Here you can see the process involved in the dyeing part of loom controlled shibori.
Some of the messages i got prompted me to show the dyeing part more clearly than what i had explained in the previous posts. The weaving here was very straightforward plain weave on 24 shafts and the supplemental weft was a twill.
The photo tute is pretty self explanatory and i will just add a few things :

• the fabric is silk and was dyed using Procion dyes and acetic acid
• stamping was made using pigments and Golden GAC900 and soft gel medium semi gloss; fabric hand did not change significantly
• as pigments do not dye they can be used to create an extra layer of color
• some more stamping was done using thickened Procion dyes

Something unusual happened here as the cotton supplemental thread took the dye very well.
Taking the slow cloth approach and instead of cutting the knots on both selvages i undid the knots and slowly pulled out the thread. i was gratified with an ikat like perle cotton thread that will be good as weft in another project. Two for the same effort. This is called energy saving and maximizing your resources :)


neki desu

loom controlled shibori memories for TIF

i remember being five or six sitting in my grandmother's living room waiting in anticipation for uncle Erasmus to arrive from one of his trips. Can you believe his name? He was my grandmother's brother and my great grandfather had named the kids Erasmus, Virgil and Homer. They missed a Dante. It was a girl, my grandma.
He was a great traveler and had all those stories to tell , so the family would gather around him and listen spellbound. Distant places, different rites, other languages i think he imbued the wander lust in me.
i also remember when i was around nine or ten my parents gave me the book Around the World in 2,000 pictures. Being an only child at that time, i would spend days and days examining the black and white photos and dreaming of being there. There were two that, heavens know why, called my attention most of all and made them very special to me.

One was of human towers, men standing on each other's shoulders forming single pillars. There was another variety that was pillar within pillar, the base being like a hurdle to support all that weight.
The other was a picture of the strangest building that i had ever seen. It was a stone boat like structure with a turret docked in the water . i wanted to know why would someone build a boat in stone, yet put it in the water. At that time i didn't know, but that was an oxymoron.

i remember watching Rome Adventure with Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette and dying to get her hairdo and go to Rome.Troy Donahue, o.k. if i got him, but what i really wanted was to go to Rome and walk those streets and see those colors.

Fast forward to the seventies when i lived in Rome. i remember those colors and the discovery of light, changing light during the day and over the seasons. Coming from the tropics where light is always the same, blinding, it was a revelation.

Many moons later i came to Barcelona for weaving reasons and was surprised to find the human towers were part of the Catalan folklore. i began to have a floating feeling, that of having closed a circle. And i stayed here.
And yet more moons afterwards one day while walking along the Tejo in Lisbon i saw the fascinating odd structure of my childhood. The Tower of Belem! i had to explain my husband what was all that excitement about lest he think that i was suffering from heat stroke.


All those memories neatly packed in boxes.

neki desu

loom controlled shibori

Here's take one finished. Aiming at getting mokume (woodgrain) shibori with those zig zags. The stamped red motifs will not dye, so they will act as extra visual texture.

Here's the second one in a diamond pattern. i stamped the warp with Pebeo soie paints in a square grid pattern. The weft is a washed denim blue silk and i'm thinking of discharging some parts and then dyeing. The warp is this silk, beautiful doupioni to look at, difficult to work with as it is fuzzy.

Loom controlled shibori offers an enormousist of possibilities. One can:

• weave in white and then dye
• weave with a colored warp and then dye
• weave with a white warp and a colored weft and then dye
• weave and discharge and then dye
• stamp with paints weave and dye
• stamp with fiber reactive dyes weave and dye
• stamp with fiber reactive dyes, discharge, weave and dye

and lots of other combinations.

As the weavings im working on are just 20 x 20 centimeters i am aiming at using this project as my February TIF hence the printed square grid. Squares are flattened boxes aren't they? :)
The caveat is that when weaving i use that time to do some hard thinking-thinking without obligation- and i would also like to work on a dimensional piece for the challenge.
Yet here i am blogging. Better get back to the loom or March will get me in front of the computer.

neki desu

mail today

Last Thursday i got my books from Amazon, and look what i got in the mail today!
I traded ATC with Susan Lenz of Cyber Fiber Exhibit. Check out the ACTs for trade here gorgeous works!

Moving on to other matters my loom controlled shibori is progressing. I finished the first one and was anxious to cut it off the loom and start dyeing, but the warp isn't very long and i would be wasting precious silk. Judiciously i've postponed the cutting off until i finish all the warp. A feat when i'm so geared.

neki desu

going home

After a long hiatus i'm back to the loom, my take on slow cloth.
It is always a source of amazement and joy to discover that i am at my best while weaving.
The past year has been one of little loom work and a lot of exploration of new techniques, and that entails some risks. Like dilution and delusion.
The Saran wrap came in the shape of thisbook that will enable me to weave it all together in one piece. i'm so excited that you will have to pardon the pun :)

Basically what one does is weave adding a supplemental thread that then is gathered tight and the cloth is dyed creatig shibori patterns.
From then one is on one's own and can add or subtract as will. Printing, stamping discharging, overprinting, foiling...
As i see it the beauty is that one is creating the cloth that will be acted on.
This looks like a series.

neki desu